DORIE GREENSPAN

Back to (Chocolate) School with Valrhona

On Monday, when all the little ones were heading back to school, I went to class too – chocolate class.  The class was a Valrhona Chocolate seminar called The Cultivation of Taste and my classmates were a pretty swell group.  Among the 70 or so people who played hookey from work to learn more about chocolate and to taste Valrhona’s new crus were the cookbook author Rose Levy Beranbaum, Judiann Woo and Raina Bien of the go-to website Pastry Scoop, Chocolat Moderne’s Joan Coukos, Alexandra Leaf of Chocolate Tours of New York, and my tablemate for the afternoon

Michael Laskonis, pastry chef at Le Bernardin and 2007 James Beard Outstanding Pastry Chef of the Year.

It’s not easy to keep a room full of opinionated professionals quiet for three (count’em) hours, but that’s what Pierre Costet, Valrhona’s Chief Cacao Sourcer (I almost wrote sorcerer)

And Vanessa Lemoine, their Sensorial Analysis Manager, did.

Speaking in French (there was a simultaneous translator on hand) and working in tandem, Pierre and Vanessa led us through the growing, fermenting and drying of cacao beans, the intricacies of finding and working with growers and the science – and pleasure – of tasting. 

There was way too much for me to recap reasonably, so I’ll just hit a couple of the highlights.

Cultivating Cacao and Cacao Growers:  As Pierre was talking and showing us pictures of the cacao growers he works with in South and Central America, the Caribbean Islands and Africa, I was struck by two things:  the startling contrast between where chocolate starts, i.e. the rustic plantations and simple fermentation and drying facilities, and where it ends, i.e., the world’s most luxurious boutiques; and the similarity between cocoa and coffee.  Then, in yesterday’s New York Times, there was a long and thoughtful piece about coffee and the similarities were reinforced for me. 

The Difference Between Odor and Aroma:  While we English speakers think of odor as something unpleasant and aroma as something delicious, Vanessa Lemoine made a completely different and extremely interesting distinction between the two.  When you bring something to your nose and smell it, what you smell is the odor.  Odor is direct.  However, when you are eating something, you are also smelling it, but indirectly or retronasally.  What you smell through the post-nasal route is aroma.  According to Vanessa – and I’ve heard and read this before – 90% of the information you get about what you eat and drink is gotten through your nose.

FiveTastes And Maybe One More:  This is my favorite news flash.  As you know, our tongue can distinguish sweet, salty, acidic and bitter tastes, as well as umami, which is a very complicated taste found most notably in protein foods.  Now, according to Vanessa, there’s the possibility that our tongues have a sixth taste receptor and what it tastes is licorice!  (As many of you know, I’m a licorice lover, so you can be sure that I’ll be finding out as much as I can about this and reporting back to you.)

How to Taste Chocolate:  Here are the seven steps to getting a full picture of the chocolate at hand: 

1) look at it so that you can appreciate its color (and its sheen – if it has been properly tempered, it will have a shiny finish);

2) bring it to your nose so that you can smell its odor;

3) break it and listen for a crisp snap (another sign of good tempering);

4) put it in your mouth to assess its texture;

5) let it melt in your mouth by pressing the piece of chocolate against your palate with your tongue;

6) distinguish the aromas, which usually come one after another and often in this order – the volatile aromas, the fruity and floral aromas, come first; they give way to the warmer aromas, those of roasting and spice; and finally the heavier aromas, aromas of toasted nuts, camphor and woods, come in; and

7) while you’re appreciating the chocolate’s aroma, you taste it, and with most chocolate what you taste at the start is acidity, which makes you salivate, and then bitterness, which is a persistent taste and an important chocolate flavor. 

And, after you’ve tasted one chocolate and want to taste the next, you should clear your palate with flat water and crustless bread – the crust (we’re talking about a loaf with a significant crust) has too much flavor and it will interfere with your tasting.

Having been instructed on how to taste, we began to taste, starting with two chocolates that Valrhona is just releasing:  Abinao, a strongly flavored, toasty, roasty chocolate with long-lasting tannins and a very high cacao content, 85% (I loved it); and Tainori, a Dominican Republic chocolate with 64% cocoa and a kind of tang, which Vanessa referred to as freshness (from the camphor flavor) and likened to the flavors you get from a sucking candy. 

Then we tasted another chocolate that I really liked, Alpaco, which was so interesting because it had the same cocoa percentage as Tainori, but was much stronger in chocolate flavor, proof once again that you can’t buy chocolate by the numbers.  With chocolate, it’s about where the bean came from, how it was fermented, dried and roasted and how the beans were blended.  (It really sounds like wine, doesn’t it?)

Finally, we tasted Palmira, which is a 68% chocolate, but which was completely different from all the other chocolates in the panel.  Palmira is made from extremely rare porcelana beans and it is a single-estate chocolate, meaning all the beans come from one estate, Plantation Palmira near Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela.  I really liked this chocolate, which seemed warm and toasty and a little spicy and all-around lovely.  (Lovely was the word I wrote in my tasting notes, even though it wasn’t one of the “approved” descriptors.)

Our reward for being such good students was five chocolate desserts made by Derek Poirier, a Valrhona chef who teaches and trains pastry chefs in the US and Canada, and Yann Duytsche, a former Valrhona pastry chef, now chef of Dolc par Yann Duytsche in Barcelona.  Some of the desserts came from Duytsche’s new book, Sweet Diversions, some were based on recipes from Valrhona's L’Ecole du Grand Chocolat and all used what Valrhona calls Grand Cru chocolates.

Here’s the box of desserts we were each given

The five cubes in the line up were:  Coca Nibs Foam; Alpaco Sacher; Abinao Hot Chocolate (with a brioche beignet); Tainori Jelly (a light agar-agar mousse); and an Araguani Cube Cake.

As I walked home, I kept thinking that if school were always this interesting – and delicious – there’d never be an attendance problem.

Farm Aid and Frankie the Butcher

Yesterday was the 22nd annual Farm Aid concert and this year it was in New York City - not exactly rural territory, but a place where people care deeply about food and where more than 70 greenmarkets stake claims every week.

And while the thousands of music lovers weren't denied funnel cakes and fries, there was plenty of organic milk and yogurt - Horizon Organic was a major sponsor - and the VIPs (artists, production people and folks who bought all-access tickets) could catch a glimpse of Alice Waters (she was in town on book tour) and have some good eats from the Dinners-at-the-Farm chefs, Jonathan Rapp, of River Tavern, and Drew McLachlan of Feast Gourmet Market in Deep River, CT, who drove their big red kitchen-on-a-truck to the city without mishap and with baskets of some of the most fabulous wild mushrooms any of us had seen in a long time. (They ended up on top of grilled pizzas.)

Michael, my husband, and I were there to lend the chefs our hands, but they were so super organized and so well staffed that there was time to duck out to hear Matisyahu and The Derek Trucks Band.

A lot of sun, a lot of music and a lot of dishwashing later, we took off,  knowing it was going to be a grand hassle to find our way off Randall's Island and on to the Upper West Side.  (If only we'd been as smart as Peter Hoffman of restaurant Savoy in Soho - he and his son bicycled to the concert!)  But no, it wasn't a hassle at all.  We stumbled on a booth marked "Transportation" and discovered that the concert organizers had arranged to ferry staff hither and yon.  So we hopped into a car with a guy who worked with Willie Nelson on a recent recording and headed across the river.

Now this is the real story of the day:  Our volunteer driver was Frankie the Butcher!  If this name sounds familiar to you, it's because he was on Law and Order and in Spider Man 2 and he was Bobby Flay's sidekick on a bunch of Food Network shows.  He's an actor, but before that he was - and still is - a real-life butcher.  In fact, he can often be found at Oppenheimer Meats on the Upper West Side.  And how can I be sure he's a real butcher?  He talked about veal chops all the way into Manhattan!  (And yes, he does look like he's related to Tony Soprano. )

I've been convinced forever that the world is a small place and that the food world is even smaller, and last night certainly proved it - again.

Dimply Plum Cake on Serious Eats

This week's Baking with Dorie recipe on Serious Eats is my Dimply Plum Cake from Baking From My Home to Yours.  It's a brown sugar and spice cake topped with plums that's very simple to make and so easy to serve - it's a terrific brunch treat and nice with tea later in the day.  It's the kind of cake than can make a sweet weekend even sweeter.  I hope you enjoy it!  Bon week-end!

Bordeaux: The Spirit of La Tupina and Jean-Pierre Xiradakis

Before I go back to France next month, I'm determined to write about more of the people I met, the places I visited and the food I ate on my last trip.  Of course these are all the things I meant to write the instant they happened, but ...

Take, for instance, our meal at La Tupina in Bordeaux.

La Tupina is a place I dreamed about.  Michael and I had first gone there in 1995 with Pierre Herme and his wife and now, 12 years later, I can still feel the pop of excitement I had when we walked through the door.  Then, as now, what greets you is a long rustic table sagging beneath the weight of pottery bowls heaped high with vegetables and wooden boards laden with thin slices of saucissons (dried sausages) so irresistible that no one walks by without pinching a piece.  And, behind the table is the centuries-old cooking hearth, taller than most men and big enough to cook most beasts.

It's fitted with spits and pulleys, grates and grills and it's here that meats are seared and poultry is roasted, and here that the fat that drips from the slowly turning ducks lands on the thick-cut potatoes and gives them a flavor you remember for a lifetime.

Jean-Pierre Xiradakis is the master of the house and, the first time we were there, it was Jean-Pierre who was working the spits and handing out small squares of pate or a piece of piping hot chicken liver to guests to as they came up to the hearth to revel in the aromas.

I returned to La Tupina about four years ago and it was just as I remembered it, and then, on this last trip, Michael and I came back with our friends Jana and Luc, who live in Bordeaux, and it was still just as wonderful. It's always risky to try to relive a treasured moment and always a thrill when the goodness you recall is sustained.

There were the ducks and the potatoes and the hefty cuts of beef, the lamb from nearby Pauillac and the chickens with skin as burnished as a great-grandmother's hope chest.  The atmosphere was as festive, the crowd as jovial (people still snatched bits off the table) and the food, what Jean-Pierre calls simple, honest food from France's southwest, as lusty and satisfying.

It was cool, drizzly and well past midnight when we left La Tupina.  As we walked out of the restaurant, there was Jean-Pierre sitting under the awning at a table with two friends.  The light from the restaurant, coupled with the mist from the rain, and the fact that they were the only people you saw as you peered down the street, made the scene look as if it had been set for a film, one that would show la belle vie in France.

We walked over to say goodnight and joined the men briefly as they savored the last of their cigars and Armagnac.  We were there for just a minute, but I left with a feeling that the trio was, indeed, enjoying a moment rare for many of us, but seemingly a regular part of their lives.  That the men were friends who truly cared about one another seemed evident; that they knew they were lucky to have this special time together seemed even clearer. 

And I wasn't the only one to be struck by the scene and the feelings it evoked.  Now, even weeks later, Michael still mentions that moment - it's become a touchstone for what it look likes to be caught in the act of relishing life.

As we were leaving, Jean-Pierre asked us if we'd want to join him for coffee and his morning walk around the city. 

At 8:30 the next morning when Jean-Pierre pulled up to the cafe on his candy-apple red scooter, you'd have thought the mayor had arrived.  Everyone waved and the waitress had his coffee and croissant at the table the instant he sat down.

Since walking was the purpose of our rendezvous, not coffee, we set off quickly, heading for the medieval part of Bordeaux.  Just steps from the beautiful, newly renovated riverfront, the modern shopping streets and the imposing limestone government buildings, is the old city, which feels more like a village.  The scale changes, the buildings' facades change and, when you come to the old church, you can imagine yourself in another time completely.

I remember a lot of what Jean-Pierre told us about the city as we walked, but what I remember best, and most fondly, is something having nothing to do with bricks and mortar and so much to do with spirit.

Every few blocks, either Jean-Pierre would stop to chat with a friend or a friend would stop him.  At some point I said to him, "It doesn't look like there's anyone you don't know.  Is this the route you take every day?"  "Oh no," he said, smiling broadly, "what would be the interest in that?  I take a different walk every day, so that each day I can meet different people, have different conversations and learn different things.  C'est ca l'art de vivre."

Yes, that's the art of living - the joy of it, too.

Of Macaroons, Memories and Missed Opportunity

I know I must have had my camera with me this morning.  Obviously, what I didn’t have was my with-it-ness because I missed a great photo op.  I was, as I usually am on summer Saturday mornings, at the Lyme Farmers Market.  I had just bought swordfish, Littleneck clams and a lobster (what a treat!) and was surveying the lines at the other stands, deciding on my next move, when Carol Dahlke came walking across the fields, headed in my direction.  Carol is due to give birth to Baby James any day now, so she usually leads with her belly, but today she led with an object I recognized immediately: a red and white box from Pierre Herme!

Carol’s parents had just returned from Paris bringing with them macaroons – lots of them.  And there was Carol, the box in one hand, the PH cheatsheet in the other, trying to decide between Ispahan and Satine and giving up (or giving in) and having them both!

I chose a classic coffee macaroon and ate it standing in the middle of the field looking out at the white market tents, the Saturday shoppers in shorts and flip-flops, the kids racing around and the horses grazing beyond the stone wall, and I just couldn’t get my bearings.  My feet were planted in the solid soil of New England, but with each bite my mind traveled further and further away until I could see myself leaving Pierre’s shop on the rue Bonaparte and walking toward my apartment.  I could see Place Saint-Germain-des-Pres stretching in front of me and I might even have heard the church bells chime if Michael hadn’t tugged on my sleeve to ask if I needed garlic. 

We all talk about that passage in In Search of Lost Time, the one in which Marcel Proust writes about how a bite of a madeleine transported him to another time and another place, but today I lived it. 

It was a wonderful moment, but a strange one, too.  I had trouble reconciling the meticulous construction, the flavor, the fragrance, even the spirit of Pierre’s macaroon with the setting.  The macaroon was so Parisian, what was it doing in Connecticut?  On the farm?  Would there have been this disparity for me if I’d never before tasted a PH macaroon?  Would I have enjoyed it less because I was missing a context?  Would I have relished it more because it would have been an initiation?  And why should food have a place?  Wouldn’t I be just as happy having caviar by a campfire as I would be eating it from a mother-of-pearl spoon in a grand chateau? 

Who would have thought one little bonbon could cause such confusion?  I know, I know - Proust!